You read me as saying vast numbers of people of the age cohort 65-74 including many of those who are Democratic Party Saints worked quite hard and pulled strings to get draft deferments, while others joined the Reserves in the expectation that they would not be mobilized. To now start throwing around snarky comments like "Cadet Bone Spurs" is to apply present day values to the world of roughly half a century ago.
Even among military veterans there is a real disconnect, many Vietnam period veterans of historic and distinguished Reserve units, found it next to incomprehensible when their successors in the post 9/11 world volunteered to augment regular and sister reserve units which were called up to active duty, rather than counting their lucky stars the unit hadn't itself been activated.
If that cohort of yours (and mine) was wrong to do so, so was Cadet Bone Spurs. Unless circumstances alter cases. Or time excuses all sins. But I'm glad you mentioned the Dubya deferment mechanism. As the head-count seems to be all we agree on, it's good to remind us Donny wasn't the only eventual President ducking 'Nam. I'm just disappointed you seem to want to excuse those boys, but continue slagging those 'Democratic Party Saints' and others. If I read you right.
But perhaps I overlooked you saying he was as right — or wrong — to do what he could to avoid the draft as any of the many thousands of others, some of them in high office today. And like them, must live with all the consequences. You might point me to the place.
As for volunteering to serve, like voting they both count as good by definition, and there are as many reasons as people deciding to do either, and no one has any business inventing a reason for anyone else's decision only to criticize it.
Compulsion and force, on the other hand, are never good.